Marc Munroe Dion: Not buying arguments for PAYT

Sunday

Jun 8, 2014 at 12:01 AM

The proposed “pay-as-you-throw” city trash program is a cynical money grab pushed on 88,000 of some of the poorest people in the state by an administration whose financial policy is a disastrous example of lousy planning and callous disregard for everyone except people who cash a city paycheck.

Marc Munroe Dion

The proposed “pay-as-you-throw” city trash program is a cynical money grab pushed on 88,000 of some of the poorest people in the state by an administration whose financial policy is a disastrous example of lousy planning and callous disregard for everyone except people who cash a city paycheck.

A year or so ago, I asked a question in this column. I’ll ask it again: When does this become looting?

Schoolyard simple. Break it down.

“Pay-as-you-throw,” like most fees, isn’t anything more than a crude attempt to circumvent Proposition 2½, the state law which says you can’t raise property taxes without letting the people vote.

Now, who in Fall River, in the summer or fall of 2014, would vote to INCREASE their property taxes? Who would vote to give the Failagain administration a few more million to pass out as raises for everyone from lawyers to cops? Who would cast that vote?

Nobody.

So, the administration decides on pay-as-you-throw, a tax that can be imposed on people without their consent. You know, just like the “rainwater tax” Flanagan promised to repeal.

Here’s a lesson for you: Taxes and fees don’t get repealed. Pay it once and your grandkids will be paying it 40 years from now.

Best of all (but not best for you), once that trash bag fee is in place, it can be raised year after year after year.

Budget deficit a few years from now? Jack the bag price up another quarter. Budget problem a couple years after that? Jack it up by a buck. It’s never going away, not any more than the “rainwater tax” is going away.

Right now, you can go to Walmart and buy 85 trash bags for $7.

Trash bags sold by the city will cost you an average of $85 for 85 bags, which means that a city bag costs about 12 times more than a Walmart bag. For that price, the bag should carry itself out to the barrel.

And trust me, the planning ends here. If the city gets to sell trash bags, there will be NO MORE financial planning between now and the next disaster, the next deficit, the next “budget crisis.”

The landfill has been “closing” for most of the 21 years I’ve worked at this paper, but there’s never been any planning for what to do when it does close.

Every few years, Fall River commissions a $50,000 study about how to “revitalize” downtown, but won’t spend a dime figuring out what to do with trash generated by the tens of thousands of people out in the neighborhoods.

A federal grant paid for a lot of the city’s firefighters. There was NO plan for what to do when the grant expired. None.

New doors on the law department. Private bathroom renovations for the mayor. A huge bond for a city park located three blocks from another city park. Raises. Always raises.

Meanwhile, your trash goes out every week, week after week, year after year and no one is paying any attention.

You know when the city starts paying attention to your trash? When they need money to pay salaries, that’s when.

Threatening to lay off or laying off city employees and then hiring them back a year or two later just guarantees another financial crisis a few years down the road.

It’s time to negotiate modest but permanent cuts to city salaries, benefits and pensions. Leave the lowest paid employees alone, but the $20-an-hour jobs should become $18-an-hour jobs and the $18-an-hour jobs should become $16-an-hour jobs.

In Fall River, most of the big employers are gone. The population is declining. Neighborhoods are dotted with abandoned buildings and unrented apartments.

Taxes and fees are continuously raised to support a government structure designed to serve the bigger, more prosperous city that Fall River once was.

City government is trapped in 1953, when everyone had a factory job, houses were cheap to buy, and families often rented the same tenement apartment for 25 years. Cops and firefighters were working class people who lived in Fall River’s working class neighborhoods.